TWICE News and Views

The last three days 872 students from across Michigan interviewed author Janie Panagopoulos as part of the TWICE ASK sessions.

Most of the sessions were on the book Traders in Time, but two sessions were on the book Little Ship Under Full Sail and Journey Back to Lumberjack Camp. In the Lumberjack session, one of the classes came to the session dressed as lumberjacks, which Janie thought was very neat.

Here are a few of the questions the students asked in the Traders in Time sessions.

• Why did you write this book?
• In chapter 12, why didn’t you tell more about Grey Eyes and McDougal?
• Why did you use the turtle as the rock in the story?
• How did you come up with all the characters in the book?
• Have you thought about writing a sequel to Traders in Time?
• How many times do you edit your book?

One of the challenges we are facing with these highly popular programs is a change to Michigan curriculum. The Michigan studies are moving from fourth grade to third grade. As you can imagine, this is causing consternation for many fourth grade teachers. In this set of sessions, we had a few third grade and 3/4 split classes participating along with fourth grade. I asked some of the teachers if they thought this program was going to work well with their third grade students this early in the school year. Here is one response:

I am teaching 3/4 split this year, and they enjoyed it as much as or more than the fourth. I was very fascinated to learn so much of the book was actually true. I think we could do this with 3rd. She is a great person to interview. As for the time of year, it was perfect because we are studying Native Americans in Mich History-so it fit right in. I read the book to the class with them following along in the books from the isd and they followed very well because itwas so interesting to them. I would definitely read it to 3rd grade and would like to use the books again. All in all, a great program.

Are you getting this same response from your 3rd grade teachers? It seems likely that we’ll be able to continue offering these programs to Michigan students.